Semiotic Drift in Immigration Adjudication: How Interpreter-Mediated Meaning Fails in UK Asylum Hearings

Abstract Asylum adjudication in the United Kingdom depends almost entirely on interpreter-mediated testimony yet treats the resulting written record as the applicant's own transparent word. This article develops the concept of semiotic drift to explain what happens in between. Tracing testimony across production, mediation, fixing and evaluation, it argues that the account reaching the tribunal is a co-produced artefact rather than a preserved original, and that the cost of that co-production is charged to the one participant who did not control it. Four terms operationalise the account: semiotic fragility, the openness of testimony before translation; semiotic thinning, the narrowing mediation imposes; semiotic vulnerability, exposure to a record the applicant cannot revise; and semiotic injustice, the wrong done when mediated signs are assessed as evidence of credibility. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the sociolinguistics of displacement, raciolinguistic theory and UK tribunal decisions, it shows that credibility assessment resolves interpretive doubt in a uniform direction while presenting itself as a neutral evidentiary test. It proposes a Semiotic Traceability Model: a principle requiring credibility-critical mediated signs to remain traceable through the adjudicative chain, and a graduated rule of attribution assigning a discrepancy to its source rather than to the applicant by default.